Monday, February 26, 2007

Self-Sufficiency

In the first post on this blog, which as things are set, you can access by scrolling all the way down, I said that I was a survivalist. I've completely neglected survivalism since that post.

As I've stated before, I recognize three rights, life, liberty, and property. There are three corresponding crimes, being murder, slavery, and theft, and three corresponding dependancies, being defenselessness, obedience, and dependance.

Survivalism has many definitions, and anyone who wants to call themself one can find an excuse to do so. There are those who call themselves survivalists who are back-to-nature types, those who stockpile ammunition and tactical supplies anticipating to kill anyone who has what they want, and any number of other ideas. So I'm going to specify here. Survivalism to me is self-sufficiency in the event of any kind of drastic change. A kind of basic economic independance.

Individualists can't afford to be dependants. Individualists must be independant. Dependancy leads to a kind of half-voluntary subservience, where you put yourself at the mercy of whoever controls what you want.

In this world, everything is interconnected, and in many cases, interdependant. Consider that a very tiny portion of the population supplies a very large portion of the poplutaion with food. Consumers depend on stores depend on distributors depend on manufacturers depend on suppliers depend on producers depend on tractors depend on fuel depends on how angry the middle east is at us. With US foriegn policy what it is, I think you can see the problem here. The producers will look for other sources of fuel if the middle-eastern supply is cut off from us, but a sudden drop in supply without a corresponding drop in demand yields a sudden sharp increase in price. As the price of production increases, the price the product increases. Those poorest neighborhoods where planning for the future is something that is to be done at some point in the future will be hardest hit and least prepared, with the most mouths to feed and the least ability to feed them. As people become desperate, they become either aggressive or they turn to the agency of aggression, the government, who incidentally, they are dependant upon.

I believe that the society most conductive to liberty would have an emphasis on being able to provide for yourself under any forseeable circumstances, although not necessarily to actually provide for yourself, the cost benefits of division of labor would make that uneconomical, just be able to if you have to. The more people are able to defend themselves, think for themselves, and not dependant upon others, the more free I think people will be.

So I believe people should be able to provide themselves with food, water, and shelter, at the very least. I believe people should be able to defend against threats to their rightfully owned means of survival, be able to choose how best to use those means of survival, and not depend on others, especially to the degree we do at present, for these things.

To me at least, it makes sense that the greater the degree of self-sufficiency a community has, the lower the degree of dependancy it has, the greater it's freedom will be, and disproportionately greater in an emergency. And I recognize that the best place to start changing the world is to change myself. So I'm a survivalist in that sense.

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